One of my favourite things to do is walk around nondescript suburban streets, building a mental map of how they fit together, and noticing small places that are important to the immediate residents, but otherwise unknown. Sometimes this hobby leads me down winding avenues of discovery to aspects of society that I have never previously considered, and Low Lane Wood is a prime example.
A recent wander through Torrisholme1, while waiting to collect a child from a club, brought me to the footpath sign shown above. It was darkling2 and muddy so I didn’t follow the path, but I like a wood, so I gave it a Google and found something wonderful. Low Lane Wood pretty much only exists in the offline world:
Of the five results of my search, only three relate to the Low Lane Wood under discussion, and these are brief mentions from the local council and conservation groups. As far as I can tell, the only other references to the wood that exist more than transiently are the footpath signposts. It’s not marked on Google Maps (although the adjoining Torrisholme Barrow is) and although it can be seen as a green blob on the relevant OS map, it is not named. It’s not even listed by the Woodland Trust, which catalogues some very small woods.
So Low Lane Wood is almost undiscoverable other than by literally stumbling upon it. I couldn’t find out why it is signposted or who named it, but to my surprise it transpired that the wood is not actually particularly old. A look at the marvellous local map archive at Lancaster University shows no wood on the 1848 or 1895 Morecambe maps which cover Torrisholme. In 1919 there is still no wood, but there is something else. In fact what is now woodland was, 100 years ago, the site of a tuberculosis sanatorium.
This was not what I was expecting, but it awoke my curiosity. I wanted to know more.
TB is a scourge of a disease which usually infects the lungs and which, untreated, often leads to death. It is still suffered by millions of people worldwide, particularly in Africa and Asia; however we are fortunate in the West that inoculation (the BCG) and antibiotic treatment have made the illness largely a thing of the past.
(Incidentally, I have often wondered what aliens visiting the UK would make of the fact that many of us have a round scar on our upper left arms. Would they think it akin to the navel? Or a sign of some sort of mind-control implantation?)
TB became particularly rampant in Europe and the US in the 18th and 19th centuries as workers poured into cities during the Industrial Revolution. It was a leading cause of death; some sources report that in Victorian times, the disease killed around a quarter of the adult population of Europe.
One gruesome aspect of this pandemic was instances in which the illness was associated with vampires. Following the death of some poor soul from TB, other family members might fall ill and start to waste away. While we now know that this was due to the infectious nature of the disease, past societies sometimes blamed it on the recently deceased returning from the dead to drain the life from their relatives. In the New England Vampire Panic of the 19th century, multiple bodies were exhumed for this reason, and their internal organs burnt, which it was thought would stop the corpse rising from the grave.
TB had such a dire impact on industrialised society that the need for new treatment avenues became imperative, and the sanatorium movement was the upshot. Pioneered in central Europe from the 1850s, the movement held that fresh air, altitude and the correct climate could benefit TB sufferers. Sanatoriums, which were in effect specialist hospitals that facilitated easy access to the outdoors, mushroomed across the continent. Their popularity persisted for decades; although the bacteria that causes TB was identified by Robert Koch in 1882, a successful antibiotic treatment was not developed until 1946. While improved sanitation and vaccination started to improve matters in the early 20th century, the disease was still rife, and sanatoriums remained the front line of treatment.
The UK was quite slow to adopt the vogue; Brits were reluctant, in part because of the country’s unpredictable climate, and partly due to an “exaggerated fear of draughts… [that] would produce the great British chill, an affliction unknown to the rest of the civilised world”. However in the late 1890s, the concept began to take off.
The scale of the movement was quite staggering. In 1938, on the eve of WWII, there were 30,000 sanatorium beds for a country with a population of 46m - around one for every 1,500 people. Equally staggering was the rate of growth, from a standing start at the turn of the century to tens of thousands of beds by the 1930s. Part of this expansion was driven by a key milestone in the birth of the British Welfare State: the National Insurance Act of 1911, which gave workers access to free TB treatment. Some of the individual hospitals built were enormous. Look at this picture of the vast winged arms of Harefield Hospital, originally built as a TB sanatorium. The balconies which gave patients access to the vital fresh air are clearly visible:
These facilities were a cultural phenomenon, a major part of life in the UK for a large part of the 20th Century. But did sanatoriums work – did they cure TB?
Despite the huge cost and effort put into their construction, little was done to find out. The Medical Research Committee, which would become the modern Medical Research Council, was founded in 191 to study TB, but instead prioritised other illnesses. Medical historian Linda Bryder writes scathingly: “Despite being financed from a tuberculosis fund, the MRC did not prioritise evaluative research on the purported treatments for the disease. There was no plan and no research design.” What little research was done was either not encouraging, or suffered from the lack of a proper control group.
However the modern consensus of opinion is that sanatoriums did not work. On its website, the Stop TB Partnership Working Group on New Drugs states bluntly that “Sanatoriums had no effect on curing tuberculosis,” and that “In the final analysis, the death rate in sanatoriums or at home were the same – about half of patients died whether they were treated in a sanatorium or not treated at home.” All that effort, all that building, all that hope, all for nothing.
And how does this all connect to Low Lane Wood? Well, Torrisholme Sanatorium, as the buildings were known, popped in and out of existence pretty rapidly. Although I don’t have a construction date, there is a reference to a sanatorium in roughly the right area in the Lancaster Standard and County Advertiser in February 1902, which fits in well with the OS maps data. By July 1929, however, the Morecambe Guardian was reporting a meeting of Morecambe Town Council in which it was stated that “all infectious cases” were henceforth to be “dealt with” in Lancaster.
From there on, things went downhill. A newspaper article from 1939 suggested that the grounds be used for allotments; in 1940 a harrumphing letter stated that “the Corporation [had] pursued a policy of letting the hooligan boys of Lancaster and Morecambe cause… great damage to the old Sanatorium”. In 1955, a depot at the site was used to store the lights used for Morecambe’s autumn promenade display. Shortly afterwards, reports fade out.
Having read all this, I decided that I had to get into those woods and look for signs of the San. The first time I made an attempt I was turned back by mud, so I waited for a sunny day, donned my sturdiest footwear, and tried again.
The woods were pleasant - steep, as suggested by the contour lines in the map above - and small. The trees were mature and deciduous, and there was no sign that the grove was a relatively recent phenomenon. Two large, flat clear areas were obviously the sites of the buildings shown in the map, but apart from a few stray bricks of dubious origin, there were no signs of the two buildings that existed until quite recently.
The TB sanatorium had disappeared as completely in Torrisholme as it has everywhere else in the UK, despite being, for a few decades, a prominent feature of national life. If my interest hadn’t been piqued by that signpost, I would never have known it existed.
For another day
One last thing: when I was researching the statistics for this piece, I came across a number that blew my mind. On its first day of existence, 5th July 1948, the NHS took control of 480,000 hospital beds in England and Wales. That was around one hospital bed for every hundred people. Pro rata, we have not much more than a fifth of those now. Where did the beds go? That’s a question that deserves a full investigation, and I shall return to it in a future post. See you next time!
A suburb of Morecambe.
I only found out what this word means a couple of weeks ago - ‘growing dark’, if you didn’t know - and so am delighted to have a sensible opportunity to use it.